Madam, - The back door is now the front door. After Tyrone's defeat of Dublin in Croke Park in the All Ireland quarter-finals it is more and more obvious that progress in the championship comes down to peaking in mid-August instead of June or July. In other words it means getting out of the provincial championship as early as possible with minimum fuss and setting out on the lucrative back-door route. With the exception of Cork, all the other three provincial champions, Armagh, Galway and Dublin, have been decisively eliminated at the quarter-final stage.
It is now beyond dispute that if a county wants to go far in the All Ireland championship, the last thing they need is a provincial title. Armagh, Dublin and Galway have all peaked far too early and have paid the penalty for taking the provincial championships seriously.
In recent years, Kerry appear to have have simply handed the Munster final to Cork under the pretence of "being out of form" or having "lost their appetite for championship football". They led at half time against Cork by nine points in the most recent Munster final - a similar sort of situation to the previous year - and "collapsed" in the second half, trying to convince everybody that they were in decline and that an era was over.
But in reality they were postponing their championship surge until August, getting another month out of their annual bye into the quarter-finals which they have enjoyed for over 100 years. The back door system is a further blessing to Kerry's position of privilege. Apart from some annual first round bit of shooting practice against Waterford or Limerick, they can now leave the Munster championship to Cork and start things in earnest at the beginning of August when provincial champions have already exhausted themselves. Kerry's last two All Irelands were from the back door, and Galway and Tyrone each have a back-door All Ireland.
It could well be that last year's Ulster champions, Tyrone, finally decided that if they wanted to give the All Ireland another tilt, winning Ulster was, to put in mildly, not that important.
The back door gives space to grow, for the Tyrone side who lost to Down in June and the Tyrone who annihilated Dublin in August are an ocean apart. Dublin's four successive Leinster titles have proved to be a millstone round their necks, as have Armagh's recent Ulster wins.
People talk about the back door giving weaker teams much more championship exposure etc, but it merely lengthens their walk along the plank.
It was set up solely to bring in more revenue, for it is hard to believe that any organisation could propose and pass such a pathetic system for the sake of the game. The old provincial system was of course a very bad system of one-round knock-outs and needed to be replaced by giving every team a series of games with equality of opportunity for all. The reality now is that one bad system is being destroyed by an even worse system. - Yours, etc,
PETER MAKEM, Armagh Rd, Newry.